Samuel J [Full Interview]
Samuel J-Inspired Journal Entry
“If you’re in those cycles that are repeating, it’s much bigger than you. Humans are great at taking things so personally…You don’t have to get personal about that. That’s just that person’s process.”
-Samuel J
This journal entry is inspired by true events. Some of the characters, names, businesses, incidents, and certain locations and events have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes. Any similarity to the name, character or history of any person is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
“John was a good man. He had taken care of the kids, but I had made him out to trap me. I hated him. I threw a bottle at him and broke the sliding door. The family thought it crazy that I would break the glass door. I thought it was crazy that I had missed. His side of the family hated me. I didn’t want kids, but I had kids, because I wasn’t going to have any more abortions. And when he died, I had found another alcoholic who helped me with my sobriety, and he had knocked me up. Well, this man went out and did more research, and when I told him I was pregnant with his kid, he fled. We had a domestic violence situation, and one night he had almost killed me. He was drunk. After 9 years of not speaking to him, I had called him, and he was still out drinking, but he said he didn’t even remember ever hurting me that night. Well, of course, he did not remember; he was a blackout drunk. And like me, he was a womanizer and loved the ladies. So my two girls are teenagers now and they both hate me, and my younger one has downs syndrome, and now I’m learning how to become the mother that I always wanted to be because I have this program,” the blond bombshell says.
When Angelie listened in the walls of Drinker’s Den, she realized that this would have been her life in an alternate reality. Should she have stayed with Sonny, she would have hated him, resented him for the kids they would have had together that she wound up taking care of on her own, and he would come home late because he would continue drinking at a bar because he couldn’t deal with responsibility of raising two children and pleasing the wife by being intimate with her. He would have chosen to escape by flirting with other women, drinking and falling into the footsteps of his father and her father, the business alcoholic, filled with a life of intrigue, and it would be up to the co-dependent to keep the secrets to maintain the peace in the family. The blond bombshell resented that, and so did Angelie, and that’s why in this particular speaker meeting, Angelie heard her alternate reality had she stayed with Sonny.
“Well, I ended up having a boyfriend, because my husband wouldn’t leave the house. I still felt controlled. Trapped. I hated asking my husband for money whenever I needed to get food for the groceries. And it was always baby this and baby that. I mean I don’t like kids. Well, except for mine…they were alright,” she continued. And that’s when Angelie knew that her decision to leave and call for a divorce was the right choice. She did not want to have his kids and stay stuck in the same job. It was kids at work, then kids at home, and that would have been way too much for her. It was insanity and she needed the adventure of being an adult and growing on her own two legs. She also knew that sooner or later, her husband would be cheating, because she would have allowed that, and she would have found herself walking in the footsteps of auntie Genny. She would have allowed him to get away with terrible things–talking down, name calling, perhaps even putting his hands on her. Because co-signing someone else’s addiction is just as bad as using with that person. And perhaps subconsciously, that’s why Angelie acted out–acted desperate, acting one minute that he was dirt and deserved to go to hell, and the next minute begging him back. The hot/cold was another mechanism in pushing the man away for good. When the withdrawals started subsiding, Angelie had found herself relieved that she was freed from the bondage of that alcoholic and addictive relationship. She knew his red flags from their first date– he told her he enjoyed watching other girls cry over him, he had no friends back home, and he, like she, grew up lonely. They were too alike. She loved him because she had compassion for him, and that compassion had warmed his hardened heart. But the alcohol. The resentments and grudges of the past that they both have suppressed manifested in manipulation and lies in both of them. Perhaps that’s why Angelie loved the movie, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They had a wet relationship, stained and fogged up by Grey Goose and Tonic, and Long Islands.
Blondie justified her cheating the way Angelie justified hers. Angelie could recall the many times she had kicked Sonny out the house a few days later, especially on those nights he did not come home the night before. He claimed that he was sleeping in the car, half passed out drunk, but she did not believe him. She realized that it became a competition between the two of them. Towards the sixth year of their marriage, Angelie was still going out to clubs, sometimes on her own, and finding men to make out with. Perhaps it was to get even because she knew that he had crossed that line a long time ago between the hostess night clubs and the late night dinners.
Like Blonde Bombshell, Angelie had also owned the house they lived together, from her inheritance, so whenever he came home drunk, lifeless, and tired, she realized this was not the life she wanted. It was perhaps the life he wanted, but not her. She tried kicking him out several times and it was wine that gave her the courage to tell him her truth, knowing that it would be the beginning of the end and the end for a new beginning.
“Sonny, I want a divorce,” she would constantly tell him whenever she got drunk. The marriage felt like a charade at this point. It was mostly just routine, comfort, and suffocation. He would consider the proposition. It did not hurt him as he originally thought it would. Perhaps by now, the alcohol had already seeped deep into his blood so much so that everything just felt like it was a video game. And when Angelie sobered up, she would be happy, grateful, and once again play the role of housewife. He knew that the same scene would repeat itself again. The cycles were more rapid towards the beginning of their seventh year. Before it would be once or twice a month, and now it was averaging twice a week. She would drink, then next thing, she was cursing at him, telling him to get out, and somewhere in-between his endless forgiveness, she had stopped respecting him.
At this point, Angelie genuinely hated Sonny. She hated every part of him, the part who had settled, the part who had resigned, the selfish part of him that would not think twice to take off his coat to put it on hers. She hated herself for marrying a fraud–she knew he manipulated because she also manipulates. Where was her life now? In a loveless marriage, a man who stopped opening up to her, connecting with her, because she had stopped doing the same to him a long time ago, and things just became routine. It felt like every day she was in the relationship, it was a day that she was not pursuing her higher calling. The world had millions of problems, and it was time for Angelie to start traveling and using her storytelling prowess for it. She had postponed it in High School, she had postponed it in College, and now she was postponing it for the Marriage.
Communistic mentality–prove your worth by doing, become utilitarian, and there is no money in creativity. Stop expressing so much.
A nail that sticks out will get nailed down.
Be like the rest of us.
And it felt like she was trying to be someone she never was–a cookie cutter housewife with a white picket fence to tend to the kids. He wanted someone she no longer wanted to pretend for. It frightened her to think of a life that her mother was living. Constantly, in front of a screen watching a life that she couldn’t live so she was living viscerally through a screen. She started having panic attacks once again. It was time to leave, but he controlled the finances, he controlled the things, and he had put his name on the house as the primary. She wanted to leave the marriage, but she realized that she had depended on him for so many things, and had given up the most important control for survival–financial control. She had given him 75% of her monthly income for the past six years because she did not want to learn the responsibility of financial growth. They bought things he wanted, they went to places she thought he would like, and they did things she thought he would like. And the year that she finally gave him waiting for him to travel with her, she started traveling and blogging on her own. She became happier and he became jealous.
“John…he was responsible and a good man to our kids, but he was trapping me. I remember they had to blockade my car, and I would climb out the window just to get some reprieve,” she said.
Angelie recalled those days when they first started dating. He would pass out completely blacked out drunk, and she had so much forgiveness because her first love was her father and that was imprinted –a hardworking man who drank until he couldn’t move, completely incapacitated, and stubborn to the very end.
And she would throw up in the car, outside the car, while they were both driving drunk and they still somehow made it home. He used to pull her hair while she threw up and she thought that that was romantic.
Two alcoholics accusing each other. They both were trapped and trapping each other. He kept a bar at home and spent their money on things that she did not care for– a pool table, two big screen HDTVs, and the more they hoarded, the more she felt empty. She wanted to travel, hike, photograph. And when she did those things, he was not there.
They rarely talked about their emotions anymore. Things became routine, dry, and busy-ness filled their relationship rather than intimacy. They’ve learned how have a civil relationship with one another, but it was routine, politeness, and lacked any genuine feelings of spiritual growth or sincerity. They were both living double lives and coming home to one way of being with each other to keep the house civil. The would watch movies together, sitting on the couch and doing mind-numbing things together the way she saw how her mother and father were also doing mind numbing things together.
After the Drinker’s Den meeting, Angelie came back to her parents’ house and found her mother and father stuck in front of a screen watching their own shows. They reminded her of Matilda’s parents–She realized that her childhood was like Matilda’s childhood: her parents were not malicious, they were just absent. They became comfortable and complacent. And Angelie was hungry for the world. They haven’t changed–they are the same two human beings putting together a show for the neighbors and friends. The outside of the home was a beautiful garden and on the inside of the home, it was filled with the noise of screens of other people acting. It was a life filled with humans acting in front of other humans on how to act–and behind the scenes of acting, there were lives of real human acting and going through the motions.
Angelie heard the woman’s life and it could have been hers. Green Eyes would have been the man who would have eventually put his hands on her the way Blonde allowed the abuser to almost choke her to death in front of her kids. It was the repeat of what Green Eyes had witnessed when he had saw his mother being choked by his dad, and those repeating patterns of our bloodline, through the line of Cain, we hurt our own, by and with the tragedy of dismembered thinking (Genesis 9:11-9:13). Total blackout She would have been another domestic violence statistic. The blonde had explained that Social Services had taken her kids away from her because she kept going back to the abuser. Angelie knew why. Angelie kept going back to Greene Eyes because in some ways, she felt that she needed to be punished for pushing her first husband away.
The day before, the topic was on forgiveness, and one woman had made a comment that it was easier to forgive others than to forgive herself.
This day, Angelie went up to the room and received her 30 day recovery chip.